


Ten for a bird you must not miss

by impossibletruths



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, Nursery Rhymes, gratuitous symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2016-08-10
Packaged: 2018-08-07 23:56:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7734814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impossibletruths/pseuds/impossibletruths
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s an old nursery rhyme, about birds and fortune and luck. It goes something like this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ten for a bird you must not miss

**Author's Note:**

> One for Sorrow has always seemed like a Perc'ahlia nursery rhyme to me, for no reason in particular (perhaps because of the magpies) so I wrote something about it.

Magpies perch in the branches overhead. They sit there and watch Vex fletch arrows, heads cocked as if they’re considering swooping down and stealing her feathers, and Vex keeps half an eye on them as she works, because they’re thieves, magpies. Greedy bastards.

“Three for a funeral,” says Percy just behind her, and Vex would jump out of her skin if she hadn’t heard him trip on a root not ten seconds ago. She looks up at him, brows furrowed in confusion. Percy, busy staring up at the birds, doesn’t notice.

“Sorry?”

He spares her a glance, then tilts his chin up towards the magpies. There are indeed three of them, staring down silently with cocked heads and beady eyes.

“It’s an old nursery rhyme,” Percy says. “‘One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a funeral, four for a birth.’”

Vex snorts. “That’s not how it goes.”

“Oh?” She hears the challenge in his voice. He has never liked being wrong, or shown up.

Vex loves proving people wrong and showing them up.

They make a wonderful pair, the two of them.

“No,” she says with a smile, and goes back to fletching her arrows. He hovers at her side for a moment, then sits with a heavy thump, coat puffing around him, and Vex only just manages to save her feathers. She shoots him a cool glare.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, and Vex huffs under her breath and returns to the arrow, sighting down the shaft. One of the feathers is crooked. She nudges it back into place with delicate precision.

“Well?” Percy prompts when she has been quiet too long. “How does it go?”

Vex considers making him wait until she finishes another arrow, just to make a point, but she’s halfway through her quiver. Besides, fun as it is to watch him wait, there is far more fun to be had in squaring off.

It takes her a moment to recall the old song, actually, but once she remembers the first few lines the rest comes to her, melody and all. When they were very, very young, Mother used to sing it. Vex remembers sitting at her feet while she worked, needle dipping through cloth in time with the the words. She sets the arrow down and clears her throat.

 _One for sorrow,_  
_two for joy,_  
_three for a girl,_  
_four for a boy,_  
_five for silver,_  
_six for gold,_  
_seven for a secret,_  
_never to be told;_  
_eight for a wish,_  
_nine for a kiss,_  
_ten for a bird_  
_you must not miss._

Percy raises an eyebrow. “Your version sounds far more optimistic.”

“It is a children’s song,” Vex points out.

“Which are exceedingly dark, if you listen to them. Ring Around the Rosie is about the Twenty Year Plague.”

He does, she supposes, have a point.

“Does that ever strike you as odd?” she asks conversationally, reaching for another arrow. Percy hands it to her, watching her work. It is not altogether so different from his tinkering, she supposes. Less fire involved, but that’s hardly a surprise. 

Percy hums in consideration. “Father always said they were warnings. To teach us young. I’m not sure he believed that, but it certainly makes sense to me.”

Vex makes a face. “Do you think? There’s not much warning there. I always thought they were to keep children from being frightened.”

“Oh?”

Vex tries to keep her face smooth. “It makes sense. Turn something scary into a song and it can’t hurt you.”

Percy stares at her. She refuses to meet his eyes.

“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” he says finally. “Or perhaps someone was just very macabre.”

“You’d know more about that than I,” she tells him, voice teasing as he moves on, and she lets herself forget the echoes of songs she and her brother whispered back and forth in Syngorn when the trees pressed in too close and the stares weighed too heavily on their backs.

“Are you insinuating something about my character?’

“Darling I don’t need to insinuate anything,” she tells him with a laugh. Percy huffs and looks back at the magpies.

“There are more of them,” he says, and she follows his eyes, counting three, six, eight black-and-white birds staring down at them.

“Eight for a wish,” she tells him, and wonders if he makes one too. Wonders what it is. Wonders if it is anything like hers.

“Nine,” Percy murmurs, and they both watch a ninth magpie settle on a branch, wings fluttering for a moment before it starts to preen. Vex’s heartbeat picks up, for some ridiculous reason. It’s only a bird. Percy’s voice is soft at her ear. “For a kiss, I believe?”

“That is how the song goes,” she agrees, pulling her gaze from the bird to glance at Percy, who isn’t watching the birds at all. He stares at her, eyes sharp behind his glasses, lips parted ever so slightly, and very, very close. There’s a slight dusting of freckles along the bridge of his nose, barely a shade darker than his skin. She never noticed before.

 _Nine for a kiss_. She shifts forwards the tiniest bit. It would be so easy to close that distance, to lean in and let her eyes flutter shut and––

“Oi, Percy!” Grog’s voice rings out, and they both startle backwards just as the goliath steps around a tree, eyes narrowed at the two of them. “The fuck are you doing? I thought you were gonna help me out.”

“I am,” Percy says, standing hastily.

“My fault Grog, I asked him for a hand,” Vex says smoothly, lie sliding off her tongue like oil, and Grog spares them one last glance before he stomps back the direction he came, grumbling. Percy brushes himself off.

“Duty calls, I’m afraid,” he says. Vex smiles at him and tries to slow her pounding heart. Her palms are sweating. Disgusting. What is wrong with her.

“What did you agree to help him with anyways?”

Percy winces. “I’m not entirely sure. It was me or Scanlan and those two together––”

“Ah, yes. Well, good luck?”

He chuckles. “Thank you. I hope we won’t need it.”

She watches him leave, coat still slightly dusty, until a flurry of wings draws her attention back to the trees. Only one magpie remains, staring down at her with a beady black eye.

One for sorrow.

“Yes,” she murmurs to herself as she returns to her work. “That would be appropriate.”

The bird chatters at her, a grating laugh, before vanishes into the canopy, and Vex tries not to think about sharp eyes or soft lips or faint freckles or the quick and calculating mind behind them. Somewhere, unseen above her, the bird laughs at her again.

“Fuck off,” she tells the forest around her, and returns to her arrows, determined to ignore the butterflies in her stomach.

It was just a goddamn nursery rhyme.

Fuck.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr at [teammompike](http://teammompike.tumblr.com)


End file.
